It is known in the art to analyze data networks, such as journals and journal citations, to determine meta knowledge about the field.
IBM Inc., described a method of determining hubs and authorities on the Internet, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,884,305, in a U.S. patent application No. 08/813,749 filed Mar. 7, 1997, mentioned in the patent and in “Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment”, by Jon M. Kieinberg, in IBM research report RJ10076(91892), topic area “Computer Science”, May 29, 1997, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference. Hubs are Internet sites that contain links to many other sites in a same field and authorities are sites that are pointed to by a significant number of relevant sites in a field. An iterative process was suggested to determine, from among a predetermined set of sites, a kernel of sites that match a hub or authority definition. In the Kleinberg paper, it is noted that the Internet is to be considered a different type of data network than journal articles.
A paper entitled “Mining the Web's Link Structure”, by S. Chakrabarti et al., in IEEE Computer, August 1999, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, describes analyzing link structures of WWW pages to determine hubs and authorities. At a site “http://www:google.com”, available on Feb. 1, 2000 and for some time before, a tool “googlescout” is generated for detecting WWW sites that are similar to a shown site, for example for finding competition.
A WWW page “www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/Project/Vanish/webquery—1.html”, apparently available at least from Dec. 11, 1996, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, describes the “webquery” project, in which a quality of a site that turns up in a search is evaluated based on the number of sites linked to the site and the number of sites links in the site.